Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An error budget is the acceptable amount of unreliability permitted by your SLO over a defined time window. It is not a target. It is not a stretch goal. It is a hard ceiling that, when breached, should trigger a pre-agreed organizational response — feature freezes, postmortems, or infrastructure investment. The formula is blunt: Error Budget = 1 - SLO Target Error Budget (time) = (1 - SLO Target) × Window Duration For a 30-day window: That last number should make you uncomfortable.

Continuous integration (CI) costs can escalate quickly as engineering teams scale. While most organizations focus on cloud bills, the true cost of CI includes slow build times, developer wait time, inefficient test execution, and overprovisioned infrastructure. CI cost optimization is the practice of reducing the total cost of CI pipelines by improving build efficiency, minimizing compute usage, and eliminating unnecessary work without slowing down development.

Three weeks into a platform modernization project, this question landed in my inbox: "Why does our deployment pipeline take 40 minutes instead of four?" This is artifact repository sprawl in practice, and it does more than slow pipelines. It fragments your security posture, your compliance evidence, and your ability to answer basic questions like "what's actually running in production right now?".

Shai-Hulud is back - this time being lighter, faster and more automated than before. This new wave, termed as Mini Shai-Hulud, has affected a number of packages from tanstack, uipath, opensearch-project and mistralai among others over the past few weeks, with the latest series of major compromises coming on 19th May, 2026 on major organizations openclaw-cn and antv. Check an extensive list of affected packages here.

Every week, thousands of engineers, SREs, and IT leaders type questions about anomaly detection into ChatGPT, Reddit, and Stack Overflow. They are all trying to answer the same underlying question: why do production incidents keep catching us off guard, and how do we stop them?

Welcome to this blog series which explores innovative uses of Ubuntu Core. Throughout this series, Canonical’s Engineers will show what you can build with this Core 26 release, highlighting the features and tools available to you.

Here are the three records most teams forget to monitor — and what happens when they break.